James Poulos writes about political news, focusing on our choices for liberty and our options for reform. He's a columnist at The Daily Beast, the host of the Free Radicals podcast, and the frontman of a band called Black Hi-Lighter.

Big Brother 2.0: What If the NSA Adopts Facebook's 'Hacker Way'?

This month’s Wiredreport on the National Security Agency’ massive new Utah compound — it’ll be over five times the size of the Capitol — looks even more terrifying after a glance at Mark Zuckerberg’s recent shareholder letter. So far, the letter has attracted attention because some think the letter shows why Zuckerberg doesn’t have to give investors much face time, and some don’t. That’s small potatoes compared to the big picture that the Utah Data Center throws into such sharp focus.

In the letter, Zuckerberg makes public something he calls “the Hacker Way,” the defining approach to Facebook’s “culture and management.”It’s worth quoting at length:

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done.

Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. [...] Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works.

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

Pragmatic. Nimble. Solutions-oriented. Amoral, but easily adaptable to idealistic ends. Sounds great, right? But what if our security-industrial complex adopted the same values?

The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

For the first time ever, in American history or in world history, a government — our government — is creating a branch of itself that turns the ethic Zuckerberg describes against Zuckerberg’s vision of the future — one defined above all by publicity and openness. From the looks of it, it’s no exaggeration to call the NSA of our very near future the US Department of Hacking. Within the next ten years — maybe less — we’re facing something much worse than the government hiring or paying hackers for the use of their skills and work product. We face a fundamental transformation in the way the federal government thinks.

Today and for the foreseeable future, the most effective critique of government is that it’s inefficient. Government, we’re told, simply misallocates resources, no matter how well-intentioned. Fed through the public sector, the desire to do the right thing results in waste, fraud, abuse, cronyism, and — perhaps even worse — a systematic discount of the system-level risk propagated by the long, baked-in accumulation of its inefficiencies. On the one hand, reforming government at the cultural level to purge its incentives to inefficiency would seem to promise a revolution in political science and public policy. But on the other hand, it augurs a giant step away from human liberty at the most basic, intuitive level.

The key to liberty is neither law nor tradition nor culture. It’s physiology. The odds are extremely high that if your physical body can’t retain an inventory of memories about your own life that’s superior to everyone else, you’re a dependent. Translated into code, if your life data is something others know better and control more than you do, your liberty is in jeopardy at a fundamental level. One way to escape this problem is by diversifying, so that a variety of entities may know more about a slice of your life than you do, but none alone knows more than you about your life in its entirety through time, past, present, and future.

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It seems seems that you failed to read the Zuckerberg quote you included. Hacking is an approach to engineering, and has little to do with the stealing of data in his statement.

More importantly, the NSA can already read and steal any information they want on you, and guess what, they already do that. However, they are also charged with protecting national security. With all of the world’s data at their fingertips, I imagine they have better things to do than read your Facebook profile.

The NSA’s abundance of information is their greatest weakness as they still struggle to process that information intelligently. Besides, I refuse to fear any agency that still runs on IE6.

Hacking is, as Zuckerberg describes it, pushing and breaking the boundaries to make things not possible with current technologies, possible. That’s just spinning the concept to give it a positive connotation. Hacking is, in the end, breaking boundaries alright -one’s personal/private boundaries. It all depends how you put your “hacking skills” to use. What incentives you have for doing the hacking.

With Facebook going public, everybody should be more concerned with how will FB use our personal data to satisfy the markets’ need for profits.

As far as the risks of the Government misusing its powers in the name of “protecting our interests”, we had just an example with the failed SOPA/PIPA legislation. And the prospects do not look well with this planned complex in Utah.